5 ms·

While it's certainly interesting to read about this sort of thing - and I'm interesting in all the computer history - it's worth pointing out that some very lar

While it's certainly interesting to read about this sort of thing - and I'm interesting in all the computer history - it's worth pointing out that some very large percentage of all computer systems, from every country and every era failed. So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, or indeed criticize their goals and failures. Like all of their contemporaries they boldly went where no-one had gone before, and like the vast majority of their contemporaries (and most everyone since) discovered limitations in both the technology of the day, and their own abilities. The important thing is not that they failed. The important thing is that they tried.

duxup 2y ago
Yeah until we got a sort of core dominant systems, late 90s? There were a lot of creative attempts at new systems and ideas. They were either going to surpass the existing systems or fall on their face entirely.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, As a Japanese(-American) I can tell you why this project failed and more broadly why Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz (and that too is on its way out). So why did the Japanese fail? It's very simple: Lack of cooperation. The article describes the project "was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry" but the results could not put any more mud on that thought. Japanese companies HATE cooperating, they will not create nor utilize common standards nor share knowledge with each other. Japanese companies will strive at every turn to create a captive market, hoping that once you've set foot in their little quagmire you will stay stuck with them. If you ever wondered why Canon camera lenses do not work on Nikon cameras and vice versa, why Kenwood microphones do not work with ICOM radios and vice versa, why Sony insisted on Memory Stick over SD card, why Toshiba threw out NAND flash technology, and so on then this is why. Try naming even a single international industrial standard to come out of Japan, you probably can't and I don't blame you. Sharing is not in Japan's DNA. Contrast the US computer industry where our companies besides Apple can and will cooperate to create and utilize common standards and push the market wider and forwards. PCI is a foremost example, but the very foundation of the industry is built on IBM PC-compatibles. All this means Japan will always be stuck with a bunch of small, individual pies nobody will care about, losing to the rest of the west who cooperate (and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint) for a much bigger pie. You can't win when you're all trying to drag each other down in a zero sum game.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  You might well be 100% right. I'd like to see the Japanese succeed, actually. However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    The only thing we needed was the compute. Everything else had been discovered by the 80s.
    - philipkglass 2y ago
      I think that we also needed a much larger training corpus than was available in the 1980s. Back then the largest textual data sets were orders of magnitude smaller.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Using neural nets. The approach taken towards AI in the 80’s was much less compute intensive.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      Neural nets with hidden layers is literally older than the Apollo 11 landing. That doesn't make sense but it is.
      - adastra22 2y ago
        Read TFA. The Fifth Generation Project involved expert systems & prolog, not neural nets.
- anon-3988 2y ago
  What do you attribute this to?
tkgally 2y ago
Not to disagree with you or the commenters pointing out other Japan-specific factors, but I think there is one more possible explanation for the project's failure: its top-down, government-bureaucrat-led nature. I've lived in Japan for forty years and have worked at a national university for the past twenty. The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not.
- komali2 2y ago
  I've lived in Taiwan for a while, not nearly as long as you have in Japan, but long enough that I have a couple observations I'd be interested in your take in, about "old hats" such as yourself. The first is that the folks that immigrated decades ago tend to hold on to the perception they had upon arrival to the country, and the various impressions, for the rest of their lives there, and these impressions inform all future observations they have about the country. For example in Taiwan a lot of older American immigrants will talk about things like crime or the police as if it was still the KMT era when Taiwan was basically a different country, and their thoughts are really strange to hear when considering modern taiwanese police (who are basically teddy bears) or crime rates (extremely low). The second is that, having spend decades in the country to which they immigrated, which is probably longer than they lived in their origin country, they seem to view everything that strikes them as odd, inefficient, or bad, as unique to their new home country. In this case such as your perception of Japan as being lead top-down by bureaucrats, when that description to me applies to basically every liberal democracy on earth. Thus: > The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not. imo, this is true for most government-led initiatives in nearly every country on earth. Not that I'm arguing against government-lead initiatives because they do result in sometimes incredible things like train infrastructure, spaceships, the internet, medical breakthroughs etc, but for the most part it seems politicians make big pitches to get elected and then just maintain status quo. Obviously Japan has some uniquely bureaucratic things about the culture as a whole (lol faxes), but on the other hand this doesn't seem to be an obstacle considering they have some of the safest pedestrian-friendly streets in the world, some of the best public transit, an excellent healthcare system, low crime rates, low homelessness, low unemployment, etc. On the ground they're doing much better than many countries. What do you think? You probably know much more about such things given your time in Japan as well as the fact that you work at a university.
RaftPeople 2y ago
I remember when this project was announced and I rolled my eyes. It has nothing to do with which country or who announced it, it was a typical grandiose announcement around things that are difficult to accomplish, probability of success was low.

duxup 2y ago

Yeah until we got a sort of core dominant systems, late 90s? There were a lot of creative attempts at new systems and ideas. They were either going to surpass the existing systems or fall on their face entirely.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, As a Japanese(-American) I can tell you why this project failed and more broadly why Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz (and that too is on its way out). So why did the Japanese fail? It's very simple: Lack of cooperation. The article describes the project "was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry" but the results could not put any more mud on that thought. Japanese companies HATE cooperating, they will not create nor utilize common standards nor share knowledge with each other. Japanese companies will strive at every turn to create a captive market, hoping that once you've set foot in their little quagmire you will stay stuck with them. If you ever wondered why Canon camera lenses do not work on Nikon cameras and vice versa, why Kenwood microphones do not work with ICOM radios and vice versa, why Sony insisted on Memory Stick over SD card, why Toshiba threw out NAND flash technology, and so on then this is why. Try naming even a single international industrial standard to come out of Japan, you probably can't and I don't blame you. Sharing is not in Japan's DNA. Contrast the US computer industry where our companies besides Apple can and will cooperate to create and utilize common standards and push the market wider and forwards. PCI is a foremost example, but the very foundation of the industry is built on IBM PC-compatibles. All this means Japan will always be stuck with a bunch of small, individual pies nobody will care about, losing to the rest of the west who cooperate (and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint) for a much bigger pie. You can't win when you're all trying to drag each other down in a zero sum game.

AlbertCory 2y ago
You might well be 100% right. I'd like to see the Japanese succeed, actually. However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  The only thing we needed was the compute. Everything else had been discovered by the 80s.
  - philipkglass 2y ago
    I think that we also needed a much larger training corpus than was available in the 1980s. Back then the largest textual data sets were orders of magnitude smaller.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Using neural nets. The approach taken towards AI in the 80’s was much less compute intensive.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Neural nets with hidden layers is literally older than the Apollo 11 landing. That doesn't make sense but it is.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      Read TFA. The Fifth Generation Project involved expert systems & prolog, not neural nets.
anon-3988 2y ago
What do you attribute this to?

tkgally 2y ago

Not to disagree with you or the commenters pointing out other Japan-specific factors, but I think there is one more possible explanation for the project's failure: its top-down, government-bureaucrat-led nature. I've lived in Japan for forty years and have worked at a national university for the past twenty. The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not.

komali2 2y ago
I've lived in Taiwan for a while, not nearly as long as you have in Japan, but long enough that I have a couple observations I'd be interested in your take in, about "old hats" such as yourself. The first is that the folks that immigrated decades ago tend to hold on to the perception they had upon arrival to the country, and the various impressions, for the rest of their lives there, and these impressions inform all future observations they have about the country. For example in Taiwan a lot of older American immigrants will talk about things like crime or the police as if it was still the KMT era when Taiwan was basically a different country, and their thoughts are really strange to hear when considering modern taiwanese police (who are basically teddy bears) or crime rates (extremely low). The second is that, having spend decades in the country to which they immigrated, which is probably longer than they lived in their origin country, they seem to view everything that strikes them as odd, inefficient, or bad, as unique to their new home country. In this case such as your perception of Japan as being lead top-down by bureaucrats, when that description to me applies to basically every liberal democracy on earth. Thus: > The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not. imo, this is true for most government-led initiatives in nearly every country on earth. Not that I'm arguing against government-lead initiatives because they do result in sometimes incredible things like train infrastructure, spaceships, the internet, medical breakthroughs etc, but for the most part it seems politicians make big pitches to get elected and then just maintain status quo. Obviously Japan has some uniquely bureaucratic things about the culture as a whole (lol faxes), but on the other hand this doesn't seem to be an obstacle considering they have some of the safest pedestrian-friendly streets in the world, some of the best public transit, an excellent healthcare system, low crime rates, low homelessness, low unemployment, etc. On the ground they're doing much better than many countries. What do you think? You probably know much more about such things given your time in Japan as well as the fact that you work at a university.

RaftPeople 2y ago

I remember when this project was announced and I rolled my eyes. It has nothing to do with which country or who announced it, it was a typical grandiose announcement around things that are difficult to accomplish, probability of success was low.